Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable about Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

In his latest engrossing work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary.

Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars

"Silos" are organizations' vertical structures, but the word has become synonymous with barriers to workplace effectiveness and connotes deep political infighting. Silos devastate organizations, kill productivity, push good people out the door, and jeopardize the achievement of corporate goals. They cause stress, exasperation, and disappointment by forcing employees to fight bloody, unwinnable battles with people who should be teammates.

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business

This is the promise of The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni’s bold manifesto about the most unexploited opportunity in modern business. In his immensely readable and accessible style, Lencioni makes the case that there is no better way to achieve profound improvement in an organization than by attacking the root causes of dysfunction, politics, and confusion.

The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues: A Leadership Fable

In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle's company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues. Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

In keeping with the parable style, Patrick Lencioni begins by telling the fable of a woman who, as CEO of a struggling Silicon Valley firm, took control of a dysfunctional executive committee and helped its members succeed as a team. Story time over, Lencioni offers explicit instructions for overcoming the human behavioral tendencies that he says corrupt teams. Succinct yet sympathetic, this guide will be a boon for those struggling with the inherent difficulties of leading a group.

Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding the Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty

Another extraordinary business fable from the New York Times best-selling author Patrick Lencioni. This new book in the popular Lencioni series shows what it takes to gain a real and lasting competitive edge.

The Three Signs of a Miserable Job

In his sixth fable, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni takes on a topic that almost everyone can relate to: the causes of a miserable job. Millions of workers, even those who have carefully chosen careers based on true passions and interests, dread going to work, suffering each day as they trudge to jobs that make them cynical, weary, and frustrated. It is a simple fact of business life that any job, from investment banker to dishwasher, can become miserable.

The Three Big Questions for the Frantic Family: A Leadership Fable

As a husband and the father of four young boys, Lencioni realized the discrepancy between the time and energy his clients put into running their organizations and the reactive way most people run their personal lives. Having experienced the stress of a frantic family firsthand, he and his wife began applying some of the tools he uses with Fortune 500 companies at home, and with surprising results.

Great by Choice

The new question: Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? In Great by Choice, Collins and his colleague, Morten T. Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times. The new study: Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins’s prior work by its focus on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators

In the years following the publication of Patrick Lencioni's best seller, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, fans have been clamoring for more information on how to implement the ideas outlined in the book. In Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni offers more specific, practical guidance for overcoming the five dysfunctions, using tools, exercises, assessments, and real-world examples.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't

Built To Last, the defining management study of the 90s, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business

Visionaries have groundbreaking ideas. Integrators make those ideas realities. This explosive combination is the key to getting everything you want out of your business. It worked for Disney. It worked for McDonald's. It worked for Ford. It can work for you. From the author of the best-selling Traction, Rocket Fuel details the integral roles of the visionary and integrator and explains how an effective relationship between the two can help your business thrive.

How to Be a Great Boss

In How to Be a Great Boss, Gino Wickman and René Boer present a straightforward, practical approach to help bosses at all levels of an organization get the most from their people. They share time-tested tools that have worked for more than 30,000 bosses in every industry. You can learn to be a great boss - and dramatically improve both your organization's performance and your team's excitement about their work.

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

Do you have a grip on your business, or does your business have a grip on you? All entrepreneurs and business leaders face similar frustrations: personnel conflict, profit woes, and inadequate growth. Decisions never seem to get made, or once made, fail to be properly implemented. But there is a solution. It’s not complicated or theoretical.

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

For decades, Peter F. Drucker was widely regarded as "the dean of this country's business and management philosophers" (Wall Street Journal). In this concise and brilliant work, he looks to the most influential position in management - the executive. The measure of the executive, Drucker reminds us, is the ability to "get the right things done". This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive.

Get a Grip: An Entrepreneurial Fable - Your Journey to Get Real, Get Simple, and Get Results

Eileen Sharp and Vic Hightower were frustrated. After years of profitable, predictable growth, Swan Services was in a rut. Meetings were called and discussions held, but few decisions were made and even less got done. People were pointing fingers and assigning blame, but nothing happened to solve Swan’s mounting problems. It felt as though they were working harder than ever but with less impact. The company Eileen and Vic had founded and built for 10 years was a different place. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

In this audio edition of the totally revised underground best seller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business, from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed.

Publisher's Summary

As CEO, most everything that Rich O'Connor did had something to do with at least one of the four disciplines on his famed "yellow sheet." Some of the firm's executives joked that he was obsessed with it.

Interestingly, only a handful of people actually knew what was on that sheet, and so it remained something of a mystery. Which was okay with Rich, because no one really needed to understand it, other than him. He certainly never suspected that it would become the blueprint of an employee's plan to destroy the firm.In this stunning follow-up to his best-selling book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni offers up another leadership fable that's every bit as compelling and illuminating as its predecessor.

This time, Lencioni's focus is on a leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization - an often overlooked but essential element of business life that is the linchpin of sustained success.

Listeners are treated to a story of corporate intrigue as Rich O'Connor, fictional CEO of technology consulting company Telegraph Partners, faces a leadership challenge so great that it threatens to topple his company, his career and everything he holds true about what makes a leader.

In the story's telling, Lencioni deftly helps his readers understand the disarming simplicity and power of creating a healthy organization, and reveals four key disciplines that they can follow to achieve it.

Once again, Lencioni delivers an utterly gripping tale with a powerful and memorable message for all who strive to be extraordinary leaders.

The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive is also available in print from Wiley.

What the Critics Say

"This is a compelling story with a significant message for executives. The lessons here are substantial, and the style of writing is succinct, thorough, and very entertaining." (David S. Pottruck, president and co-CEO, The Charles Schwab Corporation) "Since implementing these ideas within our company, I've seen morale and productivity increase dramatically. Lencioni encourages us as managers to deal with human issues that are not quickly quantifiable in a spreadsheet or a quarterly report." (Glenn Kiser, vice president and general manager, Skywalker Sound, Lucas Digital LTD.LLC)

The book starts with a fictional account of two businesses that illustrate the books premise that creating a "healthy" organization is as if not more important than having an "intelligent" organization. The story does a good job of delivering the message and keeping the listener interested. The last hour follows with a detailed explanation of the steps to create a healthy organization, and it is something I will go back and listen to multiple time. I highly recommend this to anyone looking to better understand how executive action/inaction affects how their organization acts/performs .

This was a great book and even better listen. The fictional story was captivating and kept me very interested. Just the story clearly reminds you of basic concepts like culture and cooperation and how important and subtle a role they play in your success or down fall.

The story captures your interest and the balance of the book covers in good detail the elements of the all-important four obsessions.

In a time that is focused on vital factors and goal oriented success in the face of ever increasing pressure to do better. This story and the four obsessions are the often forgotten basics that are quickly thrown to the side in rush to get the job done.

A good book for all managers and those who may have lost site of those basic concepts that help to keep you on track and achieving your goals with a minimum of friction.

I manage a staff of around 30 and found the insights presented in this book to be excellent and highly useful. The author presents his four dimensions of leadership in a unique and inspiring manner in the form of a story. I have held managerial positions in both government and private organizations and feel this book would be equally insightful for executives in both public or private organizations.

The Four Obsessions is a catchy FABLE; it is not trying to be a novel. I listen in my car and always found myself sitting for several minutes after I'd reached my destination. The story is simple but captures your attention because of its relevance to reality. The narrator is excellent. His voice is clear.

The story begs the question...Do you, your management team and your organization exhibit what is described by Rich O'Conner's four principles? The last section of the book describes the four principles in detail.

Would you listen to The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive again? Why?

This was my third audiobook by Lencioni and I was not disappointed. The story line explores the issues perfectly, and reading this while driving, found it both engaging and memorable. This read is motivational, wouldn't we all like to be the best!

I appreciate the author's style and the Obsessions seem to be very relevant to my situation at work. He uses a story to illustrate the points he's making. The story sets up the Obsessions while providing memorable characters and a context for the content. I've listened to this 3 or 4 times and recommended it to several people.